Creatively Assembling The Self: An Inquiry Into Memoirs

• In Event: Ethnographic Approaches to Social Psychology

Abstract

Why do memoirists of our time always happen to recall the color of a burnt curtain, the smell that lingered on the torn pants while the main plot was happening on the side? With data drawn from my 21-month participant observation in memoir training settings, complementary interviews, published memoirs and how-to texts, I tackle the question around the magical use of physical details and sensory memories, a technique closely associated with the memoir boom of the 1990s and 2000s and widely taught and practiced for remembering the past and representing the self. Presented as a small, unprocessed cue that accidentally elicits private emotions and activates personal memory for both the memoirist and the reader, the detail is nevertheless planted in a careful narrative curation to achieve the effect of seemingly spontaneous authenticity.
Borrowing from Ricoeur’s depiction of testimony as the link between imagination and memory, I discuss the double institutional reigns of creative representation and truthful recollection over memoir. Weaving together conversations around memory, narrative identity, cultural cognition, I zoom in on a critical cognitive moment when a cultural-physical object resonates with the audience and exhibits its hidden affordances not in direct perception, but in narrative reconstruction. With this framework, I organize the different lines of reasoning memoirists use for designating physical memory a solid sign of authenticity, and follow through a learning process that prepares people to actively dig in the mnemonic-representational practice for a vivid, deep experience of time and the world that is facilitated by but distinct from perception. This analysis of the remembered physical detail shall shed light on a more general symbiotic process in which we experience and construct selfhood through attending to uncertainties in not only the present, future but also past environments.

Author

• Dian Sheng, Columbia University